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TV Goes Too Far: Who Needs Ultra HD?

NEW YORK ( TheStreet) -- For as long as I have covered computing, technology and content have been racing one another, with technology winning.

My first PC, bought in 1982, had a green screen like an oscilloscope and could only display letters-and-numbers. I had to buy a brand new
Microsoft(MSFT - Get Report) Windows '95 PC in 1994 just to display primitive cartoons, run off a CD-ROM.

But technology keeps on accelerating. By early in the last decade it was assumed that you could run video files on your PC, the only limit being the speed of your connection. With broadband, you could download a full screen in real-time.

Now it's common to watch high-definition movies on devices like the
Apple(AAPL - Get Report) iPad and
Amazon(AMZN - Get Report) Kindle. The latest movies, in all their glory, download as fast as they display.

But technology has no patience with today, no matter how insanely great, and just as we're getting used to HD, the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas is bringing us something called Ultra High Definition.

Ultra HD specifications were finalized last May and claim to have four times the number of pixels as standard HD sets. Since most people change their TVs every seven years, most now have HD sets and the price of a flat screen set is now down to $364,
as
The Washington Post reports
.

Good news for you, bad news for TV makers like
Sony(SNE - Get Report) and
Vizio. Bad news for chipmakers like
Qualcomm(QCOM - Get Report) and
Broadcom(BRCM). Technology companies can't sit back just because you're happy. They have go forward, and hope you will follow, to the next big thing, and the next, and the next.

Trouble is, there's little programming yet for Ultra HD. Sony has put 10 of its movies into the format, in order to sell sets and the coming standard,
as
The Huffington Post reports
, but that's about it for now. Still
Samsung, Vizio,
HiSense LG and
Sharp all announced Ultra HD products at this show.

It's a chicken-and-egg problem the industry faced before, with HD, but back then you at least had movies made in the format to fall back on. This time, we're putting in better sets than the studios can supply with content.